It has often been said that literature is the primary art form in Russia, yet writers’ envious admiration for the cinema goes back at least to the 1910s. Mandelstam, Nabokov, Mayakovsky and Joseph Brodsky are examples, while the philosophical reflections in literary scholar Lidia Ginzburg’s diary were leavened by her love of Charlie Chaplin. Now the Franco-Russian writer Andreï Makine honours this heritage with A Woman Loved, which, translated by Geoffrey Strachan, depicts the quest by fledgling director Oleg Erdmann to create a biopic about Catherine the Great (pictured) in the apparently unpromising setting of Brezhnev’s Russia.
Oleg, caught between life among drunken neighbours in his horizontal tenement and a day job in the Leningrad abattoir, is the type of melancholic fantasist in Russian literature that you’ll find as far back as Pushkin and Gogol. When his former teacher and patron, Bassov, dies, Oleg’s slender chances of getting anywhere with his movie become skeletal.
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